Clara and Robert Schuman, Two Eminent Members of the Nobility of Western Culture

One of the most elegant examples of director Lee Daniels’ powerful artistic sense comes in an early scene of his Oscar-bound film, The Butler.

As the movie opens, protagonist Cecil Gaines, the gray-haired White House butler, reminisces about his childhood.

Gaines’ thoughts drift to a deep south cotton field in the year 1926. Like other black “field hands,” young Cecil is picking cotton alongside his family.

The camera sets up the scene, pans the field, and eventually works its way in close to the eight-year Gaines. His father teaches him how to know when a boll is ready for picking. One can feel the heat, the humidity and the palpable oppression of the plantation owned by Thomas Westfall and his grandmother Annabeth.

Way Down South in the Land of Cotton, Old Times There Are Not Forgotten…

Clearly, things in this cotton field have changed little since slave days.

But as this scene develops, it is what one does not hear that is so beautiful, so subtle.

One doesn’t hear the default music that 99 out of 100 directors would have plugged into the sound track here. There is no sorrowful blues guitar. No moaning spiritual. No chorus of an unrepentant South.

Neither River Jordan nor Dixie echo in this “Land of Cotton.”

Rather, can you dig Robert Schuman’s Piano Concerto in A Minor?

Say what?

Schuman’s only piano concerto is one of the most beautiful examples of the serious music of the Romantic era. Dark, brooding, an always lovely interplay between piano and orchestra, it grips soul and heart.

What is it doing here?

Clearly, serious thought is given to such a choice. It is simply impossible that the finger of mere chance landed on this composer and this piece of music for this horrible moment.

One more or less obvious reason for the use of any such “cultured” music here is that the very contrast between the elegant music and the sordid cotton field paints in harsh strokes the gulf between the gentility embodied in the White House and the sweat and dirt of the cotton field. The famous Godfather christening scene raised (or, more properly, lowered) to cliché such contrast between action and music.

The Klan Marches in Washington, 1926, Upholding Western Values

In 1926, Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House. Some 35,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. In much of America the life of a black man (or a “Mexican” or an “Indian”) was worth just what the temper of a randomly encountered white man would bear.

But there is, I suggest, a deeper point, a more profound moral and historical scoring.

Consider first the evil plantation owner’s very family name: Westfall.

Then consider that Schuman and his piano concerto embodied what many consider to be the best of Western high culture: nobility of thought, an enlightened and idealistic view of humanity, and a reverence for beauty for beauty’s sake. These are indeed vauable artifacts of Western culture. They might even be the ones that white supremacists have in mind when they congratulate themselves for belonging to the factually non-existent category of the “white race.”

Yet all of these ideals have been precisely savaged—at best ignored—throughout the brutal centuries within which people of any color have had the fell misfortune of being visited by Western culture.

Schuman wrote his beautiful piece in 1845. Let us examine a few signal events of the same year for some instructive contrasts

In May, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society.

Powdered, Perfumed, and Ready for Elegance

The powdered and perfumed elite who would later thrill to Clara Schuman’s performances of her mentally ill (and eventually institutionalized) husband were for the most part perfectly okay with—or at best indifferent to—the enslavement of other human beings, the treatment of others supposedly made in the image of God, as no better than and often worse than the lowest and dumbest of animals.

The horror of it is stunning.

There is more.

In the July-August issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review editor John L. O’Sullivan opined that foreign powers were trying to prevent American annexation of Texas in order to impede “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” (O’Sullivan need not have worried so much. In December, Texas entered the Union…as a “slave state.”)

O’Sullivan’s was the first known use of the powerful phrase “manifest destiny.”

This odious concept taught that Western (the historically non-existent “Anglo-Saxon”) culture had been selected and, indeed, divinely charged with the duty to expand itself to the West (and anywhere else that it could ooze).

A Benefit of High Western Culture: Becoming the Subject of Human Trafficking

Manifest Destiny was the “white man’s” imperialist burden to violently conquer the hapless “little brown people” of the world. The generous conquerors would bestow upon these inferiors some few of the wonders of high Western culture (a patronage that usually amounted to little more than forced religious conversion, a mandatory change in dress, and a peonage equivalent in all but name to slavery).

Where in hell, my child, do you think America’s imperial holdings in Puerto Rico, Texas and the Great American Southwest, Panama, Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, and other hapless nooks and crannies came from?

It is the outstanding warrant for this savage and violent betrayal of its own values that the West in general and the United States in particular have yet to fully account. Many seek to evade this ineluctable accounting in the smug cant of the Tea Party and the lies of the thinly disguised racist plutocracy that now controls the right wing in America.

It is this fall from the grace of noble ideas to the putrescence of racism and slavery that is embodied in the name of Thomas Westfall. Just another plantation owner, enjoying centuries of violent subsidization.

The United States Joint Forces Command provides mission-ready joint-capable forces and supports the development and integration of joint, interagency, and multinational capabilities to meet the present and future operational needs of the joint force.

Clear on that? If this multisyllabic concatenation of jargon is an example of the kind of prose Bush the Lesser got from Strategic Genius Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, no wonder the Iraq adventure went bad.

A more sharply written product of the command is an intriguing document titled the Joint Operating Environment 2008, also known as JOE 2008. JOE is described as an “historically informed, forward-looking effort to discern most accurately the challenges we will face at the operational level of war, and to determine their inherent implications.” It’s a kind of road map of bad stuff that can happen military-wise through the 2030s. (You can download a pdf of the 51-page report here.)

Poor JOE 2008 got itself into an appendage wringer the moment it was released to the public last December, with this statement:

The rim of the great Asian continent is already home to five nuclear powers: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Russia.

Uh-oh. Did someone say, “North Korea”? That put some nameless, faceless, but exceedingly honest bureaucrat’s appendage right smack in the kimchi. See, the United States has vowed it will never accept North Korea as a nuclear power. JOE hit the fan and someone commanded the command to clarify things thusly:

The statement regarding North Korea does not reflect official U.S. government policy regarding the status of North Korea. The U.S. government has long said that we will never accept North Korea as a nuclear power. This clarification has been communicated to the embassy of the Republic of Korea.

Well, that certainly “clarifies” things. However, according to a report in The New York Times today, North Korea could have as many as six nuclear bombs. The matter thus seems to turn on what the meaning of “is” is. For more background on the Korea kerfuffle, see this Korea Times piece. But, because JOE 2008 was originally an internal document, a fair inference would seem to be that this is a case of truth colliding with diplomatic fiction.

JOE 2008 also made this sobering observation:

In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.
….
The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.

….

A serious impediment to growth in Latin America remains the power of criminal gangs and drug cartels to corrupt, distort, and damage the region’s potential. The fact that criminal organizations and cartels are capable of building dozens of disposable submarines in the jungle and then using them to smuggle cocaine, indicates the enormous economic scale of this activity. This poses a real threat to the national security interests of the Western Hemisphere. In particular, the growing assault by the drug cartels and their thugs on the Mexican government over the past several years reminds one that an unstable Mexico could represent a homeland security problem of immense proportions to the United States.

Drug Traffickers Are Building Submarines Like These in the Jungle (DEA Photo)

As observed elsewhere on Fairly Civil, Mexico is indeed in an exceedingly violent existential struggle with drug trafficking organizations, largely armed by smugglers who easily acquire their military-style killing machines — including semiautomatic assault rifles, Barrett 50 caliber anti-armor sniper rifles, and “vest-busting” handguns like the FN FiveSeven — on the wide-open U.S. civilian firearms market. Latino street gangs — like the 18th Street gang and MS-13 — are increasingly involved in the traffic of both drugs and guns, as described in detail in my forthcoming book from the University of Michigan Press, No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement (Spring 2009).

A failed Pakistan is truly scary (what happens to its 50 nukes?). But a truly failed Mexico — JOE 2008 does not predict such a result, but merely observes this could happen — would put all kinds of evil right across the border.

Mexico Before The Mexican American War

Putting aside the sensitive and imponderable question of the likelihood of a collapse, what seems to have grabbed the attention of Mexican authorities is the JOE’s reference to “an American response.” Alarm bells were quite fairly raised, given the history of U.S. incursions into Mexico, particularly the ripping off of a huge chunk of Mexican territory in the name of Anglo-Saxon “Manifest Destiny” in the so-called Mexican American War. (This sordid history is also laid out in No Boundaries.) Mexican officials read the JOE 2008 report as suggesting armed U.S. intervention might be necessary. Secretary of Governance Fernando Gomez Mont tartly rejected that idea in an interview with CNN in which he declared “inadmissible” the suggestion of United States intervention.

But what could the implications of a failed Mexico be for the United States? The answer would obviously depend on the definition of failed state. (For definition go here, and for Foreign Policy Magazine’s index of failed states, go here.) Among the principal attributes of a failed state are “loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions; an inability to provide reasonable public services; and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.” Here are a few impacts one can extrapolate from this definition and the JOE 2008 report.

1. North-bound immigration would be increased by hordes fleeing disorder. This happened during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s and the wars in Central America in the 1980-1990s. It has also been reported that some Mexicans in the United States illegally are already deciding to stay here — in spite of pressure from toughened immigration enforcement — because they fear the violence in Mexico more than they fear ICE’s raids.

2. The illegitimate use of force, failure to provide public services, and co-option of national decision-making would spread throughout the region and exacerbate existing economic distress. This would impel even more migrant flight. For one example of the spread of Mexican DTO violence in the region, see this CNN report from Guatemala.

3. This increased immigration would add more pressure to the challenge of Latino assimilation in the United States. The JOE 2008 report addresses this issue under the rubric of “Trends Influencing the World’s Security”:

By the 2030s the U.S. population will climb by more than 50 million to a total of approximately 355 million. This growth will result not only from births in current American families, but also from continued immigration, especially from Mexico and the Caribbean, which will lead to major increases in America’s Hispanic population. By 2030 at least 15% of the population of every state will be Hispanic in origin, in some states reaching upwards of 50%. How effective Americans prove in assimilating these new immigrants into the nation’s politics and culture will play a major role in America’s prospects. In this regard, the historical ability of the United States to assimilate immigrants into its society and culture gives it a distinct advantage over most other nations, who display little willingness to incorporate immigrant populations into the mainstream of their societies.

4. Intra-Mexican violence would spread to the territory of the United States. Violence by the Mexican drug traffickers is reported to have already come to the United States (mostly in the form of internal warfare, settling unpaid debts, etc.) But first-generation ethnic groups have always stayed in touch with political developments in their home countries, and some minority of such groups has often inflicted violence on factional rivals in the United States. Moreover, the United States has often served as a home base for exiled opponents of one or another Latin American state, launching clandestine operations from U.S. soil.

5. The proximity of the United States to uncontrolled Mexican territory (no man’s, or if you prefer, no woman’s land) would invite the establishment of clandestine bases and training grounds by terrorist and other armed groups wishing to do violent ill to the United States or its interests in the region. JOE 2008 makes an elegant point one can relate to this possibility, which is the ability of small, informally organized, but extraordinarily violent groups to take advantage of technology:

One does not need a militia to wreak havoc. Pervasive information, combined with lower costs for many advanced technologies, has already resulted in individuals and small groups possessing increased ability to cause significant damage and slaughter. Time and distance constraints are no longer in play. Such groups employ niche technologies capable of attacking key systems and providing inexpensive countermeasures to costly systems. Because of their small size, such groups of the “super-empowered” can plan, execute, receive feedback, and modify their actions, all with considerable agility and synchronization. Their capacity to cause serious damage is out of all proportion to their size and resources.

6. The supply of illegal drugs would explode. Freed of even minimal existing enforcement restraints in Mexico, traffickers would be free to concentrate on building and strengthening their ties and conduits with Latino (and other) gangs inside the United States.

If you were President Obama, what would you do?

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Tom Diaz is a lawyer, author, journalist, and an accomplished public speaker. Diaz was formerly Democratic Counsel to the Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He worked for then-Rep. Charles E. Schumer. His principal brief covered issues related to terrorism ... Continue reading →